Business success relies upon many different factors, but one is certainly about keeping up with the Jones’.
Sitting around meeting room tables and coming up with new ideas for your business is certainly a huge part of the deal, but if you have no idea what your main competitors are doing, you’re missing out on important information. How can you go one better when you have no idea what your nearest rival is up to?
Now, spying isn’t the best option here, and ethically you’re walking on thin ice, but there are many ways you can keep a close eye on what your competitors are doing, without breaking any rules, all from the comfort of your professional office furniture.
Check out this infographic for a little information on what you need to remember when analysing your nearest rivals.
Source: https://blog.infegy.com/infographic-analyzing-competitors
Part and parcel of business success is making cost effective decisions to ensure that your business is able to continue trading at a high level. One of the most cost effective ways to monitor your competition is certainly via the online world.
The majority of a business’ marketing these days is done via websites, backlinks on blogs, and via social media. There are many tools you can use which help you to monitor your competitors’ activity on these platforms, and the information you find from your searches can be discussed around your desks, and counter-decisions made to attempt to one-up your rivals.
Of course, it may very well be that you don’t need to go one better, and that your choice of business style is working very well for you. In that case, you simply need to keep a close eye on what is going on. It could be that one of your competitors suddenly comes up with a game changer of a product, and it leaves everyone else floundering in their wake. This is something you need to be aware of.
Knowing what your rivals are doing is really about knowledge and gathering information, and not necessarily having to make decisions which counteract their actions. Every business is a separate entity and it’s important to remain true to your mission statement and your brand identity, in order to avoid alienating your current customers. If one of your competitors chooses to go down a different route, i.e. launching a brand new product, that doesn’t mean you have to instantly put into place a knee-jerk reaction, it means you simply need to see how it goes. If you find that you’re losing customers as a result of their actions then you need to develop something which pulls your market share back.
There is enough space in most markets for more than one business, and monopolies are certainly no good for the economy. With that in mind, being co-exist and make a good profit, whilst continuing to grow your brand is really the biggest aim for every business.
All of this can be done manually. For instance, you can sit in your comfortable executive office chair and you can look at new marketing campaigns which have been launched by your closest rivals. You can analyse that information and work out whether any of this is going to affect your business share, and whether you need to change your marketing tactics as a result. It’s not about stealing ideas and making them work for you, it’s about simply being aware of what is going on and making decisions and choices if needs be.
Businesses need to exist on their own merits, and copying competitors isn’t the way to do it. Instead, focus on cutting costs by becoming more sustainable, focusing on morale to ensure higher productivity, and constantly coming up with new, innovative ideas for business growth. When you do that, it doesn’t matter what your competitors are up to!